Catholic Sensibility

Something different than last week’s experience: I’ve begun my summer project of losing fifty pounds. By the time the students return for Fall semester, my plan is to be back at my college weight.

I’ve shared with a number of people my diet plans and the various reactions are often entertaining, if not thoughtful.

My wife was concerned about the lack of root vegetables and fruits, at least in the early stages. That can’t be right, she said. I assured her it was. I’m supposed to be burning extra body fat and the aim is to get rid of it as fast as is healthily possible.

One parishioner gave me the look over and questioned if fifty was too much to lose. I assured her it was not.

Today a student saw me drinking from my shaker cup and asked if I was on medication. When I told her it was a prepared soy beverage, she said, “Awkwarrrrd!” I assured her it was fine. A strawberry shake does look like pepto bismol.

I texted my daughter a photo of strawberry cake at the funeral dinner Saturday night and I said in honor of her birthday (and her favorite flavor of cake) I was eating this last sweet before my diet began. “Awww,” she texted back.

One of my brother’s friends started going on about weight swings on diets. Haven’t you found, he asked me, that you put the weight right back on when you end the diet? I haven’t found that at all, I said. This is my first diet.

I decided during Lent it was time to get serious about weight loss. I had big plans of restructuring my life in Ames three years ago to more healthy options, especially walking to work (1.5 miles) every day. Within three months, my achilles tendons were swollen and sore. I’ve been feeling an occasional creak in the knee. I’ve been feeling very tired at some times during the afternoon. I figure before things get worse, I should make a serious effort to get to a healthy weight.

I spent nearly two months researching various plans after getting an e-mail from a parishioner who does diet coaching on the side.

I will spare you readers any before and after images. I’m telling a number of people at the parish so they can encourage me. Feel free to do the same. I warned my wife that I’m totally committed to this. No cheating. Not even a piece of gum.

A friend in Central America asked me about the best economic deal for a Honduran priest leanring English and presiding at Mass for a group of Indian Missionaries of Charity.

But I was thinking the guy will have to get the India edition, right? Anybody else in need of a cross-national MR3 experience? What’s the choice here?

I thought I would share the music for the psalm setting I composed last week. My friends Dave and Cathy Moklebust did a super arrangement for organ and handbells. At the funeral I added hammer dulcimer.

Note: the link to the keyboard/vocal score is now fixed.

I began following The Southern Cross, the media organ of the Catholic Church in South Africa when they began implementing MR3 a few years ago. I return to that site regularly for sensible commentary. This week, editor Günther Simmermacher offers a South African perspective on the Vatican’s new norms for dealing with sexual abuse.

He touches on many issues, the Amnesty International condemnation, the Jay report, the authority tension between Rome and the local bishop.

The money quote:

Only a policy that is uniform, transparent and accountable will put to rest questions about the Church’s unequivocal commitment to rid itself of clerical sexual abuse.

Mr Simmermacher acknowledges that it is “remarkable” that Vatican norms are even needed. Truly, the idea that bishops need guidelines to deal with sinful behavior suggests that for all the institutional talk about sex and abuse, the clergy and hierarchy are ignorant about it all when you boil the issue down to essentials.

Mr Simmermacher also concedes that if a bishop screws up in handling a case, there’s pretty much nothing to be done. Except to watch the moral reputation of bishops, if not Catholicism as a whole, continue to circle the drain.

National conferences of bishops have particular responsibilities, as we read in these two sections:

31. Since it is a question of local culture, it is understandable that the constitution Sacrosanctum Concilium assigned special responsibility in this matter to the “various kinds of competent territorial bodies of bishops legitimately established.” (SC 22; cf. SC 39, 40, canons 447-448ff) In regard to this, episcopal conferences must consider “carefully and prudently what elements taken from the traditions and cultures of individual peoples may properly be admitted into divine worship.” (SC 40) They can sometimes introduce “into the liturgy such elements as are not bound up with superstition and error … provided they are in keeping with the true and authentic spirit of the liturgy.” (SC 37)

After the direct quotes from Vatican II, a few previews of what is to come later in VL:

32. Conferences may determine, according to the procedure given below (cf. Nos. 62 and 65-69), whether the introduction into the liturgy of elements borrowed from the social and religious rites of a people, and which form a living part of their culture, will enrich their understanding of liturgical actions without producing negative effects on their faith and piety. They will always be careful to avoid the danger of introducing elements that might appear to the faithful as the return to a period before evangelization (cf. below No. 47).

In any case, if changes in rites or texts are judged to be necessary, they must be harmonized with the rest of the liturgical life and, before being put into practice, still more before being made mandatory, they should first be presented to the clergy and then to the faithful in such a way as to avoid the danger of troubling them without good reason (cf. below, Nos. 46 and 69).

These steps all seem to be sensible, if they are carried out with due competence, study, and preparation.

Jimmy Mac sent me this editorial piece by Sandro Magister suggesting the pope does not walk the talk on good liturgical music. Summing up:

In other words, it remains incomprehensible why (Pope Benedict) should have decided to decline a few simple practical decisions that were and are fully within his grasp, in a field like this, which he sees as so crucial and on which he has very clear ideas. And why he has left such decisions to men who, seeing what they do, certainly are not helping him in his effort to restore light and the “splendor of truth,” including musical, to the Catholic liturgy.

I don’t have a dog in this fight, really. Some people follow the pope’s example, but papal liturgies are pretty far from the universe in which I serve. My goal is to get the choir of the assembly singing. The quality of the choir is important, and it’s always good to strive for the best possible artistic presentation of music. But the true mark of any fruitful music ministry is how it engages the spiritual life of the people, including how they sing and respond at liturgy.

Our consideration of Preliminary Conditions for Inculturation of the Liturgy wraps up here:

30. To prepare an inculturation of the liturgy, episcopal conferences should call upon people who are competent both in the liturgical tradition of the Roman rite and in the appreciation of local cultural values. Preliminary studies of a historical, anthropological, exegetical and theological character are necessary. But these need to be examined in the light of the pastoral experience of the local clergy, especially those born in the country. (Cf. Ad Gentes 16, 17) The advice of “wise people” of the country, whose human wisdom is enriched by the light of the Gospel, would also be valuable. Liturgical inculturation should try to satisfy the needs of traditional culture (Cf. Ad Gentes 19) and at the same time take account of the needs of those affected by an urban and industrial culture.

In 1994, there was still a value placed upon competence. More so, this section seems to presume a collaboration between bishops, liturgists, cultural experts, native clergy, and “local wisdom.” I’m not sure why non-mission nations would not benefit from this type of wide counsel. Do you? Any readers from Asia or Africa with any experience of this sort of collaboration. I know occasional commenter Fr Brendan from Japan has lamented the intrusion of the curia (not mentioned here) into matters of liturgy.

Priest-father, not real father. Real fathers would more likely align with mons and kids on this one.

Until the Julie Hess letter was released last week, there wasn’t much St Blog’s action on the KC-SJ scandal. I searched through some sites and still nothing on many.

Red Cardigan got testy on her site. So did her combox, a bit:

At face value, this sounds like Erin is ready to join Voice of the Faithful. Although I say that tongue in cheek.

Father Z is taking his spiritual flints and slings to Mass, while warning you that only yellow smiley faces are welcome from the commentariat. He mentions the attacks of hell, but let’s be real: the bishop and vicar general both have allied themselves with a priest who has serious sexual problems outside of the Christian moral mainstream. If anyone’s closer to hell on this one, well, you can read my mind.

Not surprising this schism would split along the lines of clergy and mothers. Or real fathers, even. As a real father, I can say my inner alarms go off whenever I detect a whimper from the young miss. It’s been true since she arrived: the love and commitment of the domestic Church trumps clergy wagons circling on the divide.

I’ve heard more from friends in the diocese south of us. People in my old parish were pretty willing to let Fr Shawn’s last chance roll by. There was concern the weekend of 21/22 May, but the pastor there is good with people, and he offered to meet with anyone who had concerns or questions.

Ignoring a principal’s letter, however, is pretty bad. I heard from a retired principal who wasn’t impressed with the timeline. The mom of one of the young miss’s friends is much angrier.

Thinking about the future I would say that people who get wind of this story …

• will be more inclined to report a priest to the police and bypass the diocese entirely.
• will be less inclined to give conservatives/traditionalists the benefit of the doubt on the high moral ground
• will be more inclined to maintain a close watchfulness in Catholic school settings
• will be less inclined to trust their bishop
• will be more inclined to tune in advocacy and protest groups

The Church itself will drift a bit farther from a practical unity: parents versus priests, priests more isolated from laity, priests wondering about bishops, the faith skeptics reinforced in their opinions about organized religion, Catholic inquirers dismayed. All in all, I’d say some people did a U-Turn on their way out of the Long Lent. Hiont to the clueless: it’s Easter. Get with the program.

My wife proclaimed the second reading at Mass this morning, including this little portion that immediately struck my ears:

Always be ready to give an explanation
to anyone who asks you for a reason for your hope,
but do it with gentleness and reverence … (1 Peter 3:15b-16a)

Reverence for God, I thought, or reverence for the inquirer?

Perhaps some of us have enough to do to be prepared to give an explanation for Christian hope. I know that in my distracted life, it’s hard to be always ready, especially a few minutes before Mass. The other week, a parishioner pestered me with a few questions shortly before the entrance song. Good questions, to be sure. Questions that might go down well over a beer or a coffee. But I wasn’t ready to give my reasons for hope.

My friend came back to me after Mass and apologized for distracting me. He might not have done that if I had bitten his head off.

I haven’t consulted the Scripture scholars on this one, but I’d like to think that reverence for the inquirer is one of the best placements for giving honor to something of the faith.

I’ve much appreciated many expressions of sympathy and the promise of prayers this past week. The outpouring of support from my internet friends, as well as parishioners and my staff colleagues, has been very heartening.

My brother was a champion swimmer in high school. His state butterfly record stood for decades. My dad remarked that the butterfly was the most demanding of the competitive strokes. And I heard the family pride embedded in that statement. I approve of my brother’s later-life approach to swimming, as I heard it related from his stepdaughter and grandson. He was also a teacher. It wasn’t simply enough for a person to outpace others. The importance of bringing along the young, the inexperienced, the untutored: this was part of what Lynn also lived. There was not so much the loss of competitive swimming after high school, but allowing his expertise there to metamorphose for a different purpose.

My mind plays tricks. On the day of hearing the news, my rational side began making calls to family back in Rochester. But soon I worried that I had misheard the news. Had I just alarmed my family back East by overblowing what was just a serious traffic injury? I would drive across Iowa and find my brother holding court among family and friends in a hospital bed. I would be embarrassed for having sent up tragic false news.

I had a similar experience the May after my father died. My wife and I were at the mall, and I remarked I needed to get to the card shop to pick out something for my dad. Anita stopped for a moment and asked, what did I say? It took me another few seconds to realize my routine of selecting and sending a Father’s Day card was over. I would never send such an item again.

Needless to say, my first ears heard right, and my rational mind had taken over. Making calls. Driving carefully. Breathing in. Then out.

So the encounter with loss continues. My wife’s advice to be gentle with self this week is important. Rather than having two sides have a war within, I’ve opted to let the rational and the affective have a gentle exchange with one another. Not emotional enough? Ah, let’s sit with that a bit. Tearing up at the sound of particular music? Let’s sit with that, too. Even bothered by the relentless good words about my brother? That’s fine, too. People say what they need to say. My brother was not a perfect man. He didn’t have to be.

At the liturgy yesterday, I was heartened by the great congregational singing. That was an encounter with fullness, the fullness of hope we place with God, and trusting that, no matter what our loss, God fills.

Family has started to arrive in numbers, so I’m not planning to post again till late Sunday–if not Tuesday. Thanks for all the expressions of support and the promise of prayers by combox and e-mail.

I was reading through the BCP (1979) Psalter the other day, to see if a passage struck me as appropriate to set musically for my brother and the funeral. This section of Psalm 36 caught my eye:

⁵ Your love, O LORD, reaches to the heavens, *
and your faithfulness to the clouds.
⁶ Your righteousness is like the strong mountains,
your justice like the great deep; *
you save both man and beast, O LORD.
⁷ How priceless is your love, O God! *
your people take refuge under the shadow of your wings.
⁸ They feast upon the abundance of your house; *
you give them drink from the river of your delights.
⁹ For with you is the well of life, *
and in your light we see light.

Verse 8 suggests the Eucharistic faith so important to my brother. His pastor commented on verse 5 in connection with Lynn’s time in the Air Force and his love of planes. I’m fairly pleased with the setting, and maybe I’ll post it next week.

The head of the Italian Bishops’ Conference, Genoa Archbishop Angelo Bagnasco on sex abuse by clergy:

a wicked emergency not yet overcome

Nothing in the Zenit bit about bishops.

More ugly revelations in the heartland, too:

The principal of a Catholic elementary school warned the Kansas City-St. Joseph chancery office that a local priest “fit the profile of a child predator” six months before the diocese took any action to remove him from ministries dealing with children.

Will Kansas City-St Joseph be the next Boston, the next Philadelphia? NCR has a copy of the hand-delivered letter to the diocese.

Girl’s underwear in a planter? Good grief. The list of Fr Shawn’s misbehaviors is almost unbelievable. I’m glad so many teachers and parents were alert to this “wicked emergency.” Clearly a lot of harm was avoided. But the December computer discovery should have been the last straw for this priest, if nothing else before it was.

The shame seems to have spread appropriately at the chancery: nothing on the diocesan organ nor its blog. I feel badly for another priest I consider a friend, Msgr Murphy, who was in residence for awhile at my previous parish when he shouldered the duty of vicar general. The VG should have taken action, even against a bishop’s objection. It was that serious. Vicars general might end up doing prison time, at least in another diocese. Murphy is too good a man to take a fall like that for his incompetent bishop.

A recent disinvite reveals the new chain of command in Church governance. Throw away the wheels and circles. Erase the entries on those old triangles. There’s a new sheriff in town. And “he” writes lots of letters.

Jimmy Mac forwarded me a letter from Angela Howarth of Liverpool to the Tablet editors:

In our parish I am very fortunate to be part of a Conversation Group that meets once a week to share and reflect on the readings for the coming Sunday. The depth and honesty of sharing never ceases to amaze me and when listening to the homily at the Mass, the priest never fails to see it from a different angle which enriches the readings further. The readings for me have taken on a whole new meaning.

So there I was at Mass last Sunday (Vocation Sunday) and waiting for the homily. Alas, I was to be disappointed as we had a letter (in the form of a CD) from one of the bishops, auxiliary Thomas Williams, about vocations. I found myself getting quite annoyed at the message that was being presented through the speakers.

As it was about vocations, it was addressed only to the men of the parish, and within that group, only a tiny percentage at that. I couldn’t help looking around and gathering statistics in my head as the voice continued:

• one priest – male
• four altar servers – 3 female
• several Little Church helpers – all female
• one reader – female
• four Eucharist ministers (I carried on gathering throughout the Mass) – all female
• organist – male
• choir – mainly female

Instead of enjoying some quiet, reflective time during communion, I made a point of “viewing” the congregation as they came forward. There were a lot of women, so the bishop’s appeal wasn’t relevant to them. And what men were there were either parents or quite elderly, so they wouldn’t have been interested in the request either.

Ironically the bishop finished with a quote from a woman doctor who had given her life to helping those in DR Congo. It’s a shame that the opportunity wasn’t taken to call all of us to some sort of vocation.

Indeed.

There are so many levels of nincompoopery in this approach it’s a wonder there are any priests at all in Liverpool or its diocese.

1. A recorded letter is used in a lot of places, audio and video. I’m not convinced, despite widespread episcopal approval and usage, that this is a valid or appropriate means of delivering the homily. In my thinking, it’s a liturgical abuse close to the level of adding raisins to eucharistic bread. Ms Howarth is accurate in her feelings of annoyance.

2. A recorded letter like this is, as Ms Howarth suggests, a shot in the dark. Ill aimed. Not unlike coming to a seaside and throwing a harpoon in, hoping to catch a whale.

3. Calling the baptized to a vocation: what a concept! Wouldn’t it be great to have a priesthood rooted in the prime sacrament of baptism, and with experience in living a baptismal life? Instead of a religious subclass trained to be serviced like some sort of pseudoaristocracy. They might be great throwing harpoons, but if you are serious about evangelization, even an outreach to bolster a clerical society, you can’t get beyond the need for one-on-one contact.

In my sleep I could have given a better homily encouraging priestly vocations, and that wouldn’t even have been legal. So an aux bishop tapes a chat and mails it in. Do you suppose any parish in that diocese got a real live body in the pulpit that weekend?

We will have visitation at Good Shepherd Episcopal Church in Webster City Friday night from five till seven. The funeral will be 3PM the next day at St Mark’s Episcopal Church in Fort Dodge.

One recent story I’d like to share … well, it’s actually not so recent. It happened before I was born. But my brother shared it with me a few months ago.

When he was a boy he used to pray the rosary. In the 50′s, there was a Catholic radio show (or station) that broadcast the rosary and he would pray it in his room.

Now, regular readers know my extended family is not Catholic. My parents were Protestants and Catholicism wasn’t even a shadow in our lives (or so I thought). My own conversion story is known to long-time readers here. But I was charmed that my elder brother also received a poke from God via Catholicism. Something must have stuck, because when he settled down in California with his wife Barbara, finding a Lutheran Church that had weekly Eucharist was essential.

When he retired to Iowa eight years ago, he left the Lutheran Church and joined the Episcopal parish. Because they had Sunday Communion, (and Oktoberfest, imaged above) and the Lutherans here did not.

For any number of reasons, there was no way my brother, a young teen with Protestant parents in the 1950′s was going to make a Catholic connection. And in my life and his, we didn’t quite make connections until much later. When I was a boy, he was serving in the Air Force out West. His kids were about the age of my younger sister and brother, so he was more of an uncle figure. He lived in California for two decades, and visits one way or the other were scarce.

But I was glad for the last several years when we connected far more often in Iowa. And sharing our respective sacramental faith.